Like this:

Last night in the supermarket I was walking behind two of the most effeminate men I have seen in my life.

I’m not going to ‘come out’ and say they were gay but it was very clear they were either a couple or ‘very close’ friends as they both displayed pretty much every possible stereotype imaginable.

These included (but were not limited to): foundation on their faces, a mince in the way they walked, super skinny jeans with no socks and deck shoes, perfectly quaffed and coloured hair, limp wrists and arm motions made with the elbows fixed to the body.

Ok, they were gay. Super gay. Very very very gay.

OK?

Oh, and they both had ‘the lisp’.

What is the deal with the lisp?

Now, I don’t want to appear as homophobic in any way, so I’m going to do ‘that thing’ where I point out the fact that I have gay friends. I have gay friends everyone! They’re gay, they’re proud and they most certainly have not suddenly adopted an inability to use their tongue properly.

Quite the opposite I’d imagine.

Anyway….

Where did this lisp come from? Can someone please enlighten me?

I mean, I understand that some gay men take on feminine mannerisms like a softly spoken tone of voice and too much perfume (cough cough gasp wheeze!), but I know very few women who have this lisp.

In fact, I know none.

Yes, that’s right; I don’t know a single woman with a lisp. Yet I have met a lot of gay men in my time (steady on…I work in travel before you ask) and a lot of them….cabin crew mostly….lisp.

Or ‘lithp’

(Isn’t it cruel that ‘lisp’ has an ‘s’ in it?)

Anyway, back to my story.

So these two were in front of me in the vegetable aisle when one of them stopped and pointed suggestively at the cucumbers.

They both exchanged looks and giggled a little before one of them saw something in the racks that had him reeling back in surprise and bemusement.

Like this:

The supermarket last night was manic, with last minute Christmas shoppers packing their trollies tight like a hungry alcoholic competition winner on a supermarket dash.

I was regrettably in there because we had run out of alcohol in the house and that’s a sin at any time of the year, let alone Christmas.

After negotiating the badly driven trollies and turkey laden imbeciles with no sense of direction or intelligence, I loaded up my trolley and slalomed my way through the festive fuckwits to the checkouts.

After queuing for an eternity behind knuckle draggers and bickering couples, I finally reached the checkout. I began loading my meagre purchases onto the belt and awaited my “sorry to keep you waiting, would you like some bags?” from the friendly checkout girl.

No, its OK, I’ll just kick my stuff all the way to the car.

Probably not the best approach as these guys were swamped with Chrismassy cretins and their sanity was hanging by a thread.

As I was stood there being thankful that ASDA didn’t sell firearms, I couldn’t help but watch the two women behind me unloading their shopping onto the belt behind mine (and yes, this time there was a divider). They were both rather large ladies, one considerably larger than the other. A lot larger.

I shall call her Zeppelina.

They were placing item after item after item after item onto the checkout which had started creaking under the weight, and I began to wonder if this was their Christmas shop or ‘just the weekly’.

Anyway, after about 5 minutes Zeppelina pulled out an empty chocolate wrapper from their trolley and gave her friend a smile that said, ‘oops, what am I like?’.

A pig?

Zeppelina used this moment to take a breather from the exhaustive nature of what she was doing (as some of those cakes looked quite heavy), and once she’d caught her breath and stopped wheezing she handed the wrapper to her friend and said, “we’ll need to explain that”.

Whilst in ASDA I noticed that the guy behind me in the queue at the checkout wasn’t putting his shopping on the conveyor belt behind mine.

It was a self-service checkout and the woman in front of me was scanning her goods at an impressive speed, so the space being created behind my shopping was fast becoming wider and wider, and yet this guy still wasn’t putting his shopping on the belt.

Odd.

He only had a 4-pint bottle of milk and a couple of loaves of bread, but his reluctance to do his duty and put said items onto the moving black rubber meant the couple behind him couldn’t put their shopping on either. Their grimacing and angry whispers to each other suggesting they were just fine with it.

Eventually Speedy Gonzales in front of me bagged up her shopping, paid and buggered off, meaning it was my turn to ‘bleep’ through my purchases. I picked up the plastic divider that had been between my shopping and that of The Flash’s wife and placed it at the back of my items on the belt.

It was at this point that this idiot sprung into action, placing his crap on the conveyor belt in under a fifth of a second. It seems he had been waiting for the divider all along. Clearly I couldn’t be trusted to stop scanning when I got to the end of my items if there wasn’t a plastic divider. I must love the bleeping sound so much that I get into a bleeping frenzy and wouldn’t think to bleeping stop without the bleeping divider!

Bleeping twat.

And what if I DID accidentally scan one of his items that wasn’t one of mine? Putting aside the fact that I didn’t need any of his shit, what would be the problem if my bleeping frenzy went a little overboard? Well, I would get a member of staff to remove it, or he gets his fucking milk paid for by a stranger.

Anyway, once he’d finished putting all (three) of his items on the belt, the couple behind him started piling their shopping on behind his with a ferocity that might suggest they’ve been waiting to do it for a while now. He looked at them nervously and shuffled his shopping closer to mine, creating a very definite gap between his and theirs.

Uh oh, no divider.

Maybe he’s worried that he might forget to stop without a divider there? Oh no!

Anyway, I finish scanning (luckily there was a divider otherwise I might have kept going) and paid for my shopping. The moment I removed my debit card from the card reader to indicate the end of my transaction (and the absolute certainty that I had indeed stopped scanning items), he practically leapt onto the plastic divider that had now become redundant and wedged it triumphantly between his shopping and that of Mr and Mrs Grimace.

He then turned back and in doing so, knocked his milk off the belt, splitting the plastic bottle and covering the floor in an ocean of the white stuff.

As I picked up my shopping bags and stepped backwards quickly, I resisted the urge not to laugh, smile, smirk or grin. The Grimaces, however, did not. They even pointed.

The self service checkouts at ASDA were an experience last night. We thought it would be so easy with my wife scanning the items and me packing them into bags.

I pressed ‘Start’ and we were greeted by a friendly female voice.

“WELCOME. PLEASE SCAN YOUR FIRST ITEM”

That’s nice. My wife picked up the first item to scan it and….

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

Unexpected? It’s a bagging area and they’re my canvas shopping bags (from this very supermarket), so if anything they’re completely expected. Calm down love.

I picked up the bags and put them down again in the hope that this impatient piece of tech would realise the additional weight is just bags. You know, being a ‘bagging’ area and all.

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

Oh for fucks sake, “Excuse me!”

I called over a female member of staff who inserted a key and typed in a passcode to allow us the luxury of continuing with the combined weight of the canvas bags in the bagging area

“PLEASE SCAN YOUR FIRST ITEM”

Finally!

(Beep)

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”

Jesus, give me a second will you?

(Beep)

(Beep)

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”

Yeah yeah, I’m just playing Tetris with our shopping so they fit in the bags better. She’s more passive aggressive than GLaDOS!*

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”

Alright! Hang on!

(Beep)

(Beep)

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

What the…? “Excuse me!”

The member of staff was summoned again. We got to know her quite well by the time the evening was through.

Just as she reached the checkout, the error message disappeared. “Oh, never mind. It seems to have figured it out”. I sent her away again.

(Beep)

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”

Grrr!

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

Eh? I’ve just bagged it. Ok, I’ll take it out again.

“PLEASE PLACE YOUR ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA”

What? Fine! I’ll put it back in again.

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

“Excuse me!”

Back she came, with the same look in her eyes of a parent whose child just will…not…stop…crying.

(Beep)

(Beep)

Uh oh. We’d filled the first three bags and had no more room for the rest of our shopping. I needed to remove the filled bags to make space for new empty ones, but this stroppy piece of machinery might blow a fuse. Shall I call our new friend over? Nah, maybe the machine will figure it out.

I removed the bags. It didn’t figure it out.

“PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE”

Oh, we will.

Back she came with her key and passcode; a tear trickling down her cheek.

“Thanks”.

She smiled, sort of.

(Beep)

(Beep)

“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA”

Fucking bags.

Key. Passcode.

This time our friend left the checkout in ‘staff override’ so it stopped whining about weight and how long we were taking. I suppose ‘male mode’ was considered a little sexist.

Why, at the supermarket checkout, are some people reluctant to put their shopping on the conveyor belt behind yours without a having plastic divider to separate the shopping? Are they afraid I’ll maliciously buy all their shopping and take it home?

Their solution seems to be to create a Grand Canyon sized gap between my shopping and theirs.

Perfect. It makes more sense than simply adding a divider once one becomes available.